Sunday 28 October 2012

First of the Seasonal hams...

Served the first of this Season's hams on Saturday night...



Mouthwatering free-range pork from our distributor in the Horowhenua
Festive Fare is already in swing, served a beautiful cooked ham for a party of 17 on Saturday.
Bookings filling up fast for the Xmas period.

Wednesday 24 October 2012

Theory: Cooking is the reason for human evolution ?


Eating a raw food diet is a recipe for disaster if you're trying to boost your species' brainpower.




That's because humans would have to spend more than nine hours a day eating to get enough energy from unprocessed raw food alone to support our large brains, according to a new study that calculates the energetic costs of growing a bigger brain or body in primates.

But our ancestors managed to get enough energy to grow brains that have three times as many neurons as those in apes such as gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans.

How did they do it? They got cooking, according to a study published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"If you eat only raw food, there are not enough hours in the day to get enough calories to build such a large brain," said Suzana Herculano-Houzel, a neuroscientist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil who was co-author of the report.

"We can afford more neurons, thanks to cooking."

Humans have more brain neurons than any other primate - about 86 billion, on average, compared with about 33 billion neurons in gorillas and 28 billion in chimpanzees.

While these extra neurons endow us with many benefits, they come at a price - our brains consume 20 per cent of our body's energy when resting, compared with nine per cent in other primates.

So a long-standing riddle has been where did our ancestors get that extra energy to expand their minds as they evolved from animals with brains and bodies the size of chimpanzees?

One answer came in the late 1990s when Harvard University primatologist Richard Wrangham proposed that the brain began to expand rapidly 1.6 million to 1.8 million years ago in our ancestor, Homo erectus, because this early human learned how to roast meat and tuberous root vegetables over a fire.

Cooking, Wrangham argued, effectively predigested the food, making it easier and more efficient for our guts to absorb calories more rapidly.

Since then, he and his colleagues have shown in lab studies of rodents and pythons that these animals grow up bigger and faster when they eat cooked meat instead of raw meat - and that it takes less energy to digest cooked meat than raw meat.

In a new test of this cooking hypothesis, Herculano-Houzel and her graduate student, Karina Fonseca-Azevedo, now a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Translational Neuroscience in São Paulo, Brazil, decided to see if a diet of raw food inherently put limits on how large a primate's brain or body could grow.

First, they counted the number of neurons in the brains of 13 species of primates (and more than 30 species of mammals).

The researchers found two things: One, that brain size is directly linked to the number of neurons in a brain; and two, that that the number of neurons is directly correlated to the amount of energy (or calories) needed to feed a brain.

After adjusting for body mass, they calculated how many hours per day it would take for various primates to eat enough calories of raw food to fuel their brains.

They found that it would take 8.8 hours for gorillas; 7.8 hours for orangutans; 7.3 hours for chimps; and 9.3 hours for our species, H. sapiens.

These numbers show that there is an upper limit on how much energy primates can get from an unprocessed raw diet, Herculano-Houzel said.

An ape's diet in the wild differs from a modern "raw food diet," in which humans get sufficient calories from processing raw food in blenders and adding protein and other nutrients.

In the wild, other apes can't evolve bigger brains unless they reduce their body sizes because they can't get past the limit of how many calories they can consume in seven to eight hours of feeding per day.

But humans, she said, got around that limit by cooking.

"The reason we have more neurons than any other animal alive is that cooking allowed this qualitative change - this steep increase in brain size," she said.

"By cooking, we managed to circumvent the limitation of how much we can eat in a day."

This study shows "that an ape could not achieve a brain as big as in recent humans while maintaining a typical ape diet," Wrangham said.

Paleoanthropologist Robert Martin of The Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois, agrees that the new paper does "provide the first evidence that metabolic limitations" from a raw food diet impose a limit on how big a primate's brain - or body - can grow.

"This could account for small brain sizes of great apes despite their large body sizes."

But "the jury is still out" on whether cooking was responsible for the first dramatic burst of brain growth in our lineage, in H. erectus, Martin said, or whether our ancestors began cooking over a fire later, when the brain went through a second major growth spurt about 600,000 years ago.

Hearths show up in the archaeological record 800,000 years ago and the regular use of fire for cooking doesn't become widespread until more recently.

But to Herculano-Houzel's mind, our brains would still be the size of an ape's if H. erectus hadn't played with fire: "Gorillas are stuck with this limitation of how much they can eat in a day; orangutans are stuck there; H. erectus would be stuck there if they had not invented cooking," she said.

"The more I think about it, the more I bow to my kitchen. It's the reason we are here."

SCIENCE NOW via Stuff.co.nz

Tuesday 23 October 2012

Wellington on a Plate Reprise






The Wellington On A Plate food festival brought in more out-of-town visitors and sold $176,677 more in tickets this year than last year.

Over the two weeks in August that the capital hosted the Visa-sponsored festival, people who came from outside the city spent more than $3.17 million.

There were 106 foodie events around town that brought in $808,677 in ticket sales, up from $632,000 last year and $412,000 in 2010. About 74 per cent of festival attendees were from the Wellington City area, but the number of visitors from out of town was up 32 per cent.

In the four years it has been running, the culinary festival has brought in more than $5.5m of spending to Wellington.
Across the city, 108 restaurants - Dine Wellington partners that had special deals and menus created to tie in with the festival - reported a 21 per cent increase in turnover as a result.

"The hospitality industry, Wellingtonians and visitors have all embraced the festival from day one, and we're all reaping the rewards," Wellington City Council economic portfolio leader Jo Coughlan said.

PartyPerfect worked with award winning Simon Wislang of Melt Restauarant (ex Rumours) doing the Kapiti Vintage event. Keep watching our blog and Facebook page for next year's event!

 There were 20,470 festival-goers and 5000 more attended free events at Moore Wilson's store. Attendance numbers did not include all free events this year so cannot be compared with last year's 25,000 festival-goers.
(Adapted from original article in DomPost, Jazial Crossley)

Thursday 18 October 2012

Mega 21st Birthday Party

Thank you to Rosarie Kum Kee who used PartyPerfect to Cater for her 21st Birthday Party








Dancing Kiribati Style




And dancing Gangnam style



















Happy Guests


































Wednesday 17 October 2012

Brief Interlude (Chuckle for the day)

Cooking and Catering is a very physical occupation. 
What if it was a spectator sport, and fans reacted the way rugby or football fans do?


Monday 15 October 2012

Behind the Scenes 21st Birthday Party: Preparation

PartyPerfect was asked to plan and deliver a Mega  21st Birthday Event for 250-300 people at the Lindale Auditorium in Paraparaumu last Saturday. This event was some months in planning and organising.



Jeanine and Angelique planned the decor, setting and food service, drew in assistance from many able bodied assistants to put together this event.

 This included Chefs Jeanine and Tai Jensen and their PartyPerfect Catering and Front of House Service Team, David and his Team from The Cafe at Lindale, and Technical and Construction adviser Glenn Charlett. Sheree was a new member to the team, ably assisting in the theming department

A Marquee was erected for the food and bar service, which was provided by the reliable team of Kirsty and Raoul. Music, sound and entertainment was arranged by the client in this case, but lighting and co-ordination was still left to the PartyPerfect Team

While we often show some behind the scenes pictures of the kitchen staff, the support and creative staff don't always get enough credit for their efforts.

Today's blog post wishes to highlight some of their input.

The end product is already featured on PartyPerfect's Facebook page, and will be blogged tomorrow or the day after.


Party Favours for 200+ guests: 
Hand-made chocolate, boxes had to be obtained, constructed, 
filled by hand, and then wrapped in stain bows







Hand-wrapping the  chocolate boxes with satin bows



Table settings and hall decoration once the awnings had been suspended and draped, the marquee erected and lighting installed









The 65kg free-range pig arrives from our supplier


The pig is placed on the roaster, only to find that it won't fit! 
A 65kg pig is a pretty big pig. 
The front and hind legs had to be trimmed to allow the roaster to close!





But wait, there's more
2 whole legs of pork are added to the roaster, seasoning is applied, the roaster lit, and the cooking and basting process commences



After an hour or two the pig is starting to get some colour, the skin is becoming sealed, and the crackling begins to brown. The pig is turned for the first time.

The roaster is now turned down, and the cooking process continued for a further 4-5 hours


The arrival cocktail glasses are set out by Megan in the foyer


A welcome message is written for the guest of honour


 The bar staff prepare the welcome cocktails: 
Blue curacao today 


The stage lighting is checked for a last time


Final checks on the timeline: 
Angelique conferring with the Masters of Ceremony (3 in this case)


Sound check by the DJ. 
Some lovely Island music enthuses our Chef Fa'afatai (Tai) Jensen to do an impromptu Samoan Island dance


Glasses are lined up, the bubbly corks popped, ready for celebration!


The PartyPerfect front of house team  with some reinforcement from "The Cafe" at Lindale, ready to serve the main course, after the Entree's had been served at the table. By now the party is rocking!


Tai gets cracking on carving that beautiful roast leg of pork



Desserts come out next. Individual pot-trifles with ice-cream were the order.
Maddie sets out 200 spoons...